There are very few ways a country can actually invest in its economy in the long term.

You mean besides dealing with the grotesque wage inequality that we have now?

People always thought that deflation (worse than inflation) would happen when a large quantity of out of work people would be unable to buy things, leading to a collapse in prices. But it can also happen through wage stagnation where people are working, but because their wage and buying power do not increase, they simply do not have the means to be consumers and grow the economy. So you end up with the same surplus of goods and services that people are unable to buy, leading to deflationary price collapses. People also put off marriage when they are poor, and there are less consuming families also. Think of an economic drought, just like California has a water drought.

To encourage a kid to go into a CS is a mean thing to do. Congress will continue to fall over themselves ever expanding the H1B program. Companies will love them right when they get out of college, but they will not pay above a certain salary - the same way a fast food joint doesn't. Then when they reach 40 years old they will be thrown on the human waste pile for not having "current" skills or not willing to put in 80 hour weeks with Mountain Dew and Hot Pockets. Like all the other recent college graduates are or newly arrived H1Bs. Then they'll be lucky to get a $10/hour job at a call center or target.

If you love a kid, encourage them to become a plumber. if they want to do programming, it can be the hobby that they can do out of love for an open source project.

I don't have a problem with offshoring. They just need to pay taxes like others do. Instead of thinking that congress will give them a tax free holiday someday so they can scoot their hoard back over here for free.

So capitalism involves cheating and gaming the H1b system to the point of criminality so corporate profits can be maximized at the expense of everything and everyone else? Sign me up for a different system.

Why are we not investing in the education of Americans so they can be the 'replacement workers'?

Part of the perfect lie that is STEM is that only a few people need training to perform manufacturing tasks. And for those few that do need some additional skills on the job training works great. Apprenticeships are alive and well in China. It does not take much looking under the rug to see the dirt, and it's everywhere. When Apple was making the first version of their iphone over in China at Foxcon they were hiring workers on a daily basis straight off from the rural farms. They were not turning anyone away.

How much training did those workers have?? Apple seemed to make do with them.

But I do not remember any widespread training in the US for those same jobs. Instead everybody was jacking their stock price higher than ever while Apple et al said that they did not have enough trained workers. Everybody wants to look the other way because they want to think that it is a shiny miracle - not the disparagement of the tech workforce that it really turned out to be at every corner.

The workers that they did have stateside they found a way to collude with other tech giants in order to control salaries. Other degreed and experienced engineers like Eric Saragoza they merely sloughed off. Nobody was going to hire him at his age when there was a giant surplus of workers looking for work even before the great recession. Merely because of how companies like Apple were able to export tech work to both India and China and eveywhere in between.

I really do not know how any stateside tech worker can buy an Apple product especially under Tim Cook, because they are actually helping to fund the demise of there own career.

So H1Bs are really just one piece of the larger puzzle used to help control the prices they are willing to pay for skilled labor in the US. When they say youngsters need to study STEM, what there really are saying is;

"we want to keep wages completely stagnant and you can help us do that by paying for your own training so we can get rid of older workers. But if you do not show up that works for us too, because we'll just get cheap H1Bs as they're easy to train and won't ask for raises. If they do, we'll just have some under the table agreements and they'll have no place to go. They can train their own replacement if they become too much of a hassle. Oh, math and physics majors, don't bother applying because you're not in our salary range either. We'll just say you're stupid and can't handle tech."

I could go on, but that's the gist of it. The really smart Electrical Engineers went to wall street and became successful quants. So at least one industry culture needed and saw the value in skills that could be transferred.

I find it's just quicker to hack the parking enforcement database than wait around for stupid government FOIA. After all, they don't ask permission to snoop around with all of our electronic communications. An email for an email, so to speak.

Posted
by
Soulskillon Sunday March 15, 2015 @11:34AM
from the hello-walls dept.

Press2ToContinue writes with news that San Quentin, a notorious California prison, has started a program to teach a class of inmates to write code. The first class will last for six months, and the inmates are learning about programming for eight hours a day. The hope is to give them the skills to find a good job after they leave prison, which in turn would reduce their chances of recidivism. Since the state's Dept. of Corrections prohibits internet access, the class only "pretends" to be online — they can't use internet-based resources, and nobody on the outside can see or use the software they create. One of the class's backers said, 'Almost every week there's epiphanies. And most of the guys in here, they've never touched a computer before. They are progressing beyond our expectations."

Actually if Scholz's star had a planetary system, that would not make any meaningful difference for the larger numbers especially considering the low accuracy. E.g. using your thought, it might take 109 years instead of 110 to reach a planet orbiting Scholz's star using a nuclear engine. So the distance would not necessarily be a lot smaller. It does have a brown dwarf companion, but again it would not make much difference time wise. Being discovered in 2013, it is not known if it has any planets orbiting it. Another question is if it gravitationally captured anything in the Ort cloud.

According to the article, there will be a satellite launched that will be able to provide more information on stars passing close by both in the past and in the future.

For those that wonder, Voyager at 125 AU is about.002 light year distant. The star was 400 times further out. Likewise, if we to launch our currently fastest spacecraft New Horizons (that is reaching Pluto soon in July 2015 at 33.77 AU) towards the star (when it was closest), it would take about 14,000 years to reach that star. There have been a number of nuclear rockets proposed, with the latest version from NASA in 2011 (the Magneto-Inertial Fusion planned for Mars missions). If that rocket reached its technological goals (by 2030), it would take roughly 110 years to reach Scholz when it was at its closest. These numbers are merely back of the envelope two digit accuracy, and are not meant to be precise but give ballpark figures.

They were able to stay in business longer because of cell phones, which hit a peak in the nineties. In fact, their stores that will stay open will be owned by a cell phone carrier and branded as such.

No matter what, they were myopic to their original business model and their employees. Otherwise, they could have been a Digikey or Mouser when it came to components. But I did know that this day was inevitable, if not predicted.